This is one of the quilts I was working on as I sat in the rental space in Colorado, where everytime Danny drove off, I’d wonder if I’d ever see him again. I couldn’t look at the cloth for months. Somehow, now I can. The dirty and chaotic feel of it captures some of the awfulness of those days in Longmont.
Deb thought I should rethink the green moon so I covered it with some organza. What do you think? An improvement is my feeling.
Here’s a poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. I get one every day now by email.
A fist. In it, stale air and a broken, cheap ring.
Here the treasure is letting go, fingers unfurling and letting the crap metal hit the floor.
I thought I was better than this.
How could I prize such junk and hold onto it so tightly? Grievance. Tallies of let downs. Replays of injurious conversations.
Rather than squeezing my scoreboard in some imaginary race to virtue, I’d like to kneel beside a fast-moving mountain stream and drop my miseries in. I’d watch them be hurled away downstream before the plop of their landing even reached my ears.
I wonder how my heart would feel were such unloading habit. I mean the literal heart – the muscle which flutters now and then but mostly reliably pumps under my clavicle, sending oxygenated blood to the body and the brain. The anatomical heart, which by the way, is also broken.
I might weigh less, unburdened by the X’s and O’s of tired comeuppance and lectures from some perch of imagined superiority.
I could see it going two ways.
In one scene, I dump the burden and then leap up, aglow with freedom — the freedom to love, the freedom to imagine otherwise, the freedom to remember glad scenes.
In the other version, I tip from my squatting position headfirst into the rushing waters and surrender — a final ablution and why not?
Which is not to say I am nothing without my scabs and scars and still oozing wounds, but rather that once those patches and gashes of pain are rendered inanimate, maybe I could let go even more.
I keep writing things that sound like I want to die and maybe I do, actually, but I am not suicidal. To the worrywarts in my circle, please note this critical difference.
Do I hear from my dead son?
Is that him in this feather or that owl hooting across the midnight hour? Do all these people claiming authority really know about life after death or do they just allow their wanting and their longing to get comfortable – here desperate ones, have a cup of coffee and a pillow and go ahead and speak as if you know something.
He still loves you, they say. He is constantly near, they say. Talk to him, they insist, he’s listening.
But what if silence is silence and silence is stripped of meaning, any and all autobiography and biography wiped away, and can be leant into hard but not for comfort and certainly not with any expectation of a voice rising up out of it and easing my devastation.
What if silence is his final gift?
My ears are ringing these days. Ring! Ring! Probably too much sugar or vinegar or coffee or who knows what. Early, midday, late, this slight rushing in the head makes me feel as if I traverse a long, long tunnel inhabited only by my fearful body and a malignant wind.
Makes silence feel like a pretty good gift, actually.
Can I plug my ears and hold my nose and go underwater somewhere and let the undead haggle over my soul and be born again?
Not in that way, but in some way — where the only anointing would be done with silence?
The silence he created by leaving. The silence crafted by his departure. The silence he left me with.
Sometimes the fading of daylight signals loss and dimming of spirit and it causes me heartache.
It’s just evening. It used to offer mood, maybe even a melancholy mood, but not this — a crux informed by vulnerability and loss.
Sometimes it’s the wind. (I know! I know I keep pointing this out but you can’t believe how inescapable the wind is).
Today the gusty air blew grief all around me. Season and direction did not matter. Its relentless tempo felt personal, antagonistic.
I am lately better at avoiding some circular thinking that clutches at my throat but today duked it out with this question: what might I have done differently had I known he was only going to live for 30 years? Home schooling? Better, more exotic travel? A condo in Boulder ten years ago?
I turn away — better not to mull on “what if’s.”
But where do I go when the wind demands my attention and the failing light robs me of peace?
A tug. A release. A cramp, a flutter, a goodbye. Look how the fall air ruffles the leaves out back! Breathe. Please keep breathing. We could all try hard harder. Pots of sympathy stowed for when supply chains break, but what about now? Another season of jack hammering, is what, she said with a clenched jaw. Just because something isn’t as terrible as an earlier occurrence doesn’t mean it isn’t still terrible. A tug. A release. A breath. You’re still breathing, right? The heart’s syncopations. The brain’s fired off messages. Memory or dream, which is it? Fear or excitement, which is it? They say grief lives in the body, but that isn’t news – everything lives in the body. Can you sing for me at night? No, no, never mind — the treachery of reminders. Better to watch Jeopardy or sit in silence, but if silence not for too, too long. In through the nose out through the mouth. Count. For your cortisol levels. Nothing will ever be the same again, but you know what? That has always been true. Breathe. The wind is trying to get your attention and not in a good way. Six or seven sirens a day – talk about cortisol! No. Never mind. Please never mention cortisol again. The heart will one day stop and that eventuality no longer terrifies me. I now know how giving death the side eye, maybe even a welcoming nod, is not the same as being suicidal. Good to know. Good to know. Jeopardy and snacks – things to look forward to. What wind what what do you want from me? Will you ever be a neutral force of climate again or will you forever harken back to a spring at the foot of the Rockies when you blew relentlessly, when you couldn’t scour away my terror, when you met my son at 7,000 feet and made him philosophical, got him waxing on about the waving grasses, how beautiful they were, the gun in his lap. I’m at sea level now. He was at 7,000 feet then. We can never truly gauge the feelings of another. Not really. So what does the wind want of me now? I don’t need a push to remember. I remember all day long – another reason to love laying my head down at night and falling asleep. Hidden despair. Expressed despair. Both unstoppable. By me. He stopped them. Once and for all. We sigh, we remember, but what we don’t do anymore is worry about him. How we worried! We worried about him even when we didn’t know we were worrying about him. That cessation, anyway, affords a blessed peace.
